General Ullman, none the worse for his experience, met them in the Transit Lounge of the OLC-6 East complex, which was where outgoing personnel were assembled prior to launch and incomers awaited transportation. Nobody had any idea where the jet might be heading now, but with the hostages freed that had become a secondary issue. The first priority was to get the Kronians out before conditions got any worse, and the means to do it was right there, in the form of the Boxcar orbiter that Delmaro’s force was supposed to have seized. The Launch Supervisor was summoned and asked to initiate preparations accordingly, while the communications section tried to get a connection through to the Osiris to update Idorf on what was happening.
Communications with the East Coast administration were erratic and confused. When Cavan and his Special Forces contingent left, preparations had been in hand to relocate the entire executive arm of government to the FEMA Southern Region command center in Atlanta, using one of the special aircraft originally equipped to provide a mobile headquarters in the event of nuclear war. An AWACS flying command post that was to provide communications while the Washington facilities were being moved had gone off the air suddenly, it was suspected from a meteorite hit. The Washington area had suffered heavy bombardment, with a lot of fires started. Cavan didn’t know how much of the East Coast was affected, but when they took off there had been huge detonations lighting up to the north. On the flight over, they had seen large fires in the vicinity of Indianapolis.
Then it was discovered that one of the launch technicians, acting on his own initiative when Delmaro’s soldiers appeared, had disabled the hydraulic systems that elevated the Boxcar orbiters to the launch position. The damage wasn’t fatal, but it could take several hours to fix. And that meant that the Kronians were not going to get out before the storm.
* * *
Personnel not involved in fixing the Boxcar elevation hydraulics or trying to establish communications with the Osiris had been moved into the sturdier, safer structures. Grid power had gone, and the facility was running on its own gas-turbine-driven generators. Outside, the air was filled with pieces of sheeting torn from roofs, metal covers and cowls, and other windborne missiles. Fifty-foot waves had demolished the boat dock and were washing over the beaches and dunes on the north side of the base. The launch complex and runway were situated on the three-hundred-foot-high Burton Mesa dominating the area, and had escaped inundation so far, but the winds had torn loose and wrecked several launch vehicles at the exposed gantries and carried away parts of the buildings and other structures. The Boxcar orbiters were protected beneath the doors roofing their enclosed servicing bays, but there could be no question of launching them until conditions eased. In the general base area, those who had not yet left on Highway One had no choice but to sit tight. Perhaps they were better off than those who had gone.
Sitting scattered around the Transit Lounge were Keene, with Charlie Hu and Colby, most of the Kronians, including Sariena but not Gallian, a mixture of Mitch’s Special Forces and Penalski’s Marines, and some staff from the complex. The walls carried posters and cutaway drawings of various spacecraft, engineering charts and procedure guides, a map of the base and another showing the surrounding area, and a bulletin board covered with notices concerning things that didn’t matter anymore. All the windows were sandbagged, and those not already blown in or smashed by flying objects had been taped. Cavan answered the remaining questions from a worn easy chair by one of the tables, sipping black coffee from a plastic mug. Alicia sat by him, her parka thrown over the back of an adjacent chair to reveal golden hair that fell to her shoulders in sinuous waves, and an equally sinuous body that drew glances from every male in the room.
“Landen and I had already agreed that it had to be Vandenberg. We figured the rest out from what happened at LAX. Beckerson and a small group who were with him on the flight from Washington announced a change of plan and transferred to a T-43 that was waiting for them when they got to Edwards. It took off within minutes, before anyone there knew what was going on. A half hour later, the same T-43 landed at LAX and collected your good woman, Fey, and her traveling companion, along with a couple of others that had also arrived there. Now, a T-43 is a biggish aircraft to be using for such a small number, but all the same we didn’t think the Kronians were on board it. You wouldn’t bring your hostages into a place like LAX. Too much risk of something going wrong. You’d keep them out of the way until the time came to produce them. But it would either lead us to them or rendezvous with them somewhere, depending on the plan.”